In a cloud, at night. Or like an army at sunrise. To every tree and every spike of grass, every ridgepole, every windowsill, they came. To every clothesline, especially. From the candy-coated wires, they formed strings—onions braided together by their tops—and we woke to find them swaying.
Don’t open the door, we say to our daughter.
Our daughter puts her hand on the knob, but the lock catches. Click. We imagine the chubby tips of her fingers nibbled down to their pin-thin bones.
They’ll come down the chimney. My husband’s voice is muffled, his head swallowed up by the flue.
Get newspapers.
Our daughter watches us stuff first a week’s worth of newspapers, then a bundle of rags I’d been saving for quilts, then a throw blanket, our winter coats, and finally the plaid sofa cushions, all into the gaping maw of the fireplace. She points there, there, where we have left cracks.
At noon, my husband and daughter sit at the kitchen table while I heat up leftover soup on the stove, slice apples, pour milk. We hopscotch between anxiety and a cool, clean calm.
By tomorrow they’ll surely move on, my husband says. The spoon goes into his mouth and stays there.
At dusk, the moths begin to stir. Our daughter switches on the living room lamps and stands at the window. The moths flock to her, as if summoned. Only the thick, golden glass prevents them from worshipping at her feet.
We switch off the lamps, but we do not sleep.
At dawn, the sun burns away an opalescent mist, revealing moths spread like lichen across the vinyl siding, stacked a dozen high on the rooftops, hanging from the eaves. Through our living room windows, we can see our neighbors on all sides, through their living room windows, pacing or shaking their heads back and forth in a gesture of this cannot be. Sometimes they pause to peer out at us, too. No one waves.
Our daughter stands on the cushion-less sofa, spreads her arms, and jumps.
She’s turning into a moth, we say to each other. We mean it as a joke, and we laugh together, but our laughter is nervous.
Good moths rest during the day, my husband tells our daughter later when he’s laying her down for an afternoon nap.
I’m a bad moth, she says.
Another day is snuffed by night, by the dusky flap of wings.
On the third morning, a hurricane of moths blows around in full force, obscuring every streak of sunrise. We keep checking the clocks, uncertain time is passing. Our neighbors are not at their windows anymore.
We’ve finished the cereal and the bread. The milk has soured, the apples turned mealy and soft overnight. The soup is gone. We don’t feel like eating, anyway, but we sit at the table together, scratching our shins with our feet. Our daughter gazes longingly out the window, chewing on her napkin.
This can’t go on much longer, my husband says. We’ll all starve or go crazy. His voice pokes holes in the cotton I’ve stuffed in my ears—I don’t want anything crawling inside.
What is it they want? His fist pounds the table. The corners of his mouth are crusted white.
They’re only moths, I say.
They’re a plague.
Our daughter slides off her chair and climbs into my lap. I clasp her warm, wormy body. Beneath butterfly-printed pajamas, I can feel the firm ridges of her abdomen. Her head smells of earth, loamy-sweet.
I think they just take some getting used to, I whisper into her hair.
My husband leaves the table and crouches by the fireplace, testing the warp and weft of the cushion barrier. He paces from window to window, jiggling the sashes, thentwists the knob on the front door. We listen to the lock catch. Click.
As if in answer, one of the moths bumps its hard skull against the kitchen window. Tap. Then another. Tap. Tap. Then another and another and another. Tap. Tap. Tap. Click. Click. Click. Tap. Tap. Click. Click. Tap. Click. Tap. Click. Tap. Click. Tap. Click. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
They’re attacking. My husband tears at his mouse-colored beard. They’re attacking.
I nod in time to the taps.
I’m going out there. They can’t do this to us.
I can barely hear him through the cotton. The clicks and taps mean—who knows what any of it means.
Over each pane of glass the moths swarm and whorl, blotting out any hope of light. If the clotheslines and trees have not been eaten, I cannot see them. If the neighbors are still alive, I cannot recall their names. Inside the cocoon of our home, none of this should matter.
I stuff so much cotton in my ears I expect my brain to bubble out my nose.
In the darkness and the quiet, our furniture is nearly unrecognizable. Was this our kitchen table? Was this our coin-specked floor? It’s difficult to tell how much time has passed. Every horizontal surface is covered in a film of pale dust, and the plaid sofa could be from this century, the last, the next.
I can almost believe we once lived here, just as I can almost believe my husband is the man howling as he’s ravaged by a million tiny jaws, that our daughter is the winged creature buzzing in the corner, close to the ceiling, that I am merely a puff of soot leaked from cracks we somehow failed to seal.
Elin Hawkinson holds an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from Eastern Washington University and a BFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from The New School (Riggio Honors Fellow). She is a former fiction editor of Willow Springs magazine, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Midwestern Gothic, Lilac City Fairytales, The Inquisitive Eater, and elsewhere. “The Moths Came” won second prize our 2018 Short(er) Fiction Contest and appears in our Spring 2019 Issue, number 68.